The Story
Shaan is the co-founder and CEO of Alia - a pop-up tool for e-commerce brands. By reading one specific book and repositioning their company, they went from $0 in revenue to $4 million ARR in just one year.
As Shaan explains: "Before the book, we had no product market fit, no revenue, and no happy customers."
The company started as a loyalty/education tool, but customers kept using it as a pop-up tool. "The difficulty in me being able to describe to you what it was kind of shows the issue with positioning."
Once they embraced that positioning, everything changed: "Last year, we went from $0 in revenue to 4 million ARR once we figured out our position."
Key Insights
The Early Struggle
"When we started, I was in college. I actually built this at my university for a club, like a fintech club on campus."
"We had two customers. One was my co-founder's cousin and the other was this girl from my class at university. People were like, 'Hey, this is cool, but where does it fit in my tech stack? What do I replace with it? And who are you?'"
"It took us about 6 months to get from two customers to about 20 customers."
The Book That Changed Everything
"My co-founder reads a book called Obviously Awesome. We read it and we understood that the customers had perceived us differently than what we were selling. And it was a hard pill to swallow, but it was an important one."
"I wanted to believe my best customers thought of us as an innovative new customer education tool. The hard truth is that they didn't think of us as that. They actually thought of us as a pop-up tool."
"If our best customers think of us as a pop-up tool and they pay us for that, you can extrapolate and say that a bunch of other customers who think of us as a pop-up tool might pay us some money."
4 Ways to Reposition Your Business
1. Change Website Copy
"The biggest thing is what can this tagline say? As you can see right here, 'the next generation of pop-ups.' And when I click on product, this says 'pop-up features.' It doesn't say 'product features' because these are only features that exist inside of the pop-up, which is all that we do."
2. Create Content About Your Position
"I actually have a bookmarked post right here: 'We're at 3.5 million ARR. Pop-ups. That's all we do.' Pop-ups equals Alia. Alia equals pop-ups. I pinned it to my profile. If someone wants to look me up, this is the first thing they're going to see."
3. Sales Calls
"When you're in sales calls, I hop on a call and say, 'Hey, I'm Sean. I'm the CEO. We do pop-ups.' That's how I start my calls. Right away when you hop on the call, it's like, 'Hey, I'm Sean. We do pop-ups and we care about pop-ups.' And they're like, 'Okay, cool. Thanks.' They know what they're here for."
Result: "I noticed very quickly on the calls, they were shorter, they were more succinct, and they closed more often."
4. Internal Language
"Everyone on the team needs to understand that we were a company before. We are still this company, but we focus on this new thing. This is all we care about."
The Gradual Pivot Process
"It wasn't all at once. We didn't do all four at once."
- •Started with sales calls - saw better close rates
- •Then content - performed better than before
- •Then website
- •Then internal language
- •"Then everyone was like, 'Oh, okay. This makes sense. Let's flip everything now.'"
3-Step Framework for Repositioning
Step 1: Read the book "Obviously Awesome" (no affiliation)
Step 2: Do the positioning exercises - "Ask yourself these questions. If you have co-founders, do it with your co-founders."
Step 3: Test on sales calls - "See the live reaction of those customers. See if those close more often. See if they understand the product better and see if they're more excited about it."
Business Numbers
- •$4M ARR
- •~1,500 brands using Alia
- •Notable customers: Nike Strength, Tom's Shoes
- •Team of 12 (3 co-founders)
Goal-Setting Philosophy
"We had two customers. My only goal was to get a third. Once we got a third, my goal was to get a fourth, a fifth, so on. It's not your job to get there right away. It's your job to get to a third, to get to a fourth, to get to a fifth, and understand how you got to those five."
Key Advice
"Do one thing and do that one thing phenomenally."
"When you're a younger founder, the one currency you have that the incumbents of your industry don't have is speed and urgency. When it comes to the incumbents, they can't move as quick as you."
"We're now in an industry where folks have been there for 15-20 years and they're going to move slower than us inherently because they're a larger company. You have that advantage."
Resources
- •Alia: https://www.alia.com/
- •Book: "Obviously Awesome" by April Dunford